After Germany was “re-united” the German government spent a lot of money on bringing East German infrastructure up-to-date and, not surprisingly, that meant updating and enhancing the decrepit autobahn and train system. Hans-Christian Schink, born in East Germany, documents this process in a series that very powerfully unmasks the empty promises behind the whole idea.Read more »

There really is only so much you can do photographically. Or maybe not. Just look at Edgar Lissel’s work. He uses a truck as a gigantic pinhole camera and has the image projected on colour negative paper (see above). And as if that wasn’t unusual enough he also produces photos using bacteria. Whenever I see work like this I am very happy that people are willing to experiment and to break the rules - how else do you get interesting photos that don’t look like what everybody else’s?
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When I saw the menu of David Hiepler and Fritz Brunier’s website I thought it was just the usual commercial photography. I was then very pleasantly surprised to find some ultra-cool photography behind some of the subjects, such as photos of Germany’s new federal ministries in Berlin. Very cool, very “sachlich”.Read more »

Albrecht Fuchs’ portraits are all quite deadpan, albeit in such a way that the subjects are not intentionally trying to look overly cool and the photographer is not adding anything fancy to make it look cool.Read more »

Museale Unterwelt is a project by Oliver Wachenfeld for his diploma thesis in “design of communications” at the university of Wuppertal, Germany. It shows stock rooms of museums, stuff that’s not being shown but, instead, stored away in the underground. You can look through the photos by clicking on any of those “Serie” links at the bottom.Read more »

Götz Diergarten studied photography at the art academy in Düsseldorf with Bernd Becher. I guess that’s not too hard to guess from looking at his work. I’m going to refrain from discussing whether it really deserves a Hasselblad Foundation grant given that it’s basically re-doing Becher’s work with just very slightly different subjects.Read more »

Michael Wesely has been doing all kinds of photographic experiments and I’m having a very hard time to decide which one I like the most. His long-term exposures (see above) are totally stunning, as are his abstract photos (“abstractions”).Read more »

Marco Breuer’s photos are much closer to what people might consider as actual pieces of artwork than most other photos. He literally works on the photographic paper using all kinds of techniques. Read more »

Lothar Wolleh’s work includes portraits of many modern artists such as Gerhard Richter (see photo above), Rene Magritte, and many many others. For Beuys lovers there’s a series of photos of the artist installing one of his works in Stockholm in 1971. Note how every word on that page contains a link…Read more »

Johannes Backes’ style reminds me of the Düsseldorf School photographers. His projects/topics are very interesting. Most of them have English descriptions to give you an idea what you’re looking at. Unfortunately, one doesn’t and that’s the one I like the most. Bundesstrasse Nr. 1 follows what the Nazis called “Reichsstrasse Nr. 1” - a motorway (note: it’s actually not an autobahn) which originates in Aachen, cuts through Berlin, and ends in what used to be East Prussian Königsberg.Read more »

Jürgen Teller won this year’s Citibank Photography Prize. Here’s an interview with him from The Gaurdian (which The Guardian hasn’t retracted, yet), and if you want it quirky why don’t you check out (Umlaut heavy) Jürgen Teller interviewing Björk?Read more »

Especially since his big show at New York’s MoMA Andreas Gursky seems to be everybody’s favourite modern German photographer. Most of his literally gigantic photos are way too big to be shown on the internet.Read more »

The new edition of Leica World features lots of interesting photographers. Finding their work online has been tough, though. I started looking for Herlinde Koelbl and, in the end, all I could really find was not the work I originally was interested in but instead a project called “Spuren der Macht” (“Traces of Power”). For the project, Herlinde Koelbl took one photo per year of a set of German politicians throughout the years 1991 to 1998. Non-Germans wil probably only be familiar with the faces of Gerhard Schröder, the current Chancellor, and Joschka Fischer, his deputy and Germany’s foreign minister. It’s too bad the photos end in 1998 when Schröder and Fischer came to power. It’s very interesting to see how Gerhard Schröder almost doesn’t change at all whereas Joschka Fischer undergoes some transformations (and not just in weight).Read more »

Lee Siegel takes a closer look at Thomas Struth’s objectivity (another review can be found here, and there are six of Struth’s photos online on the MET’s website). Struth is another famous graduate of the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf.Read more »

At the Liverpool Tate Gallery, there’s a big Thomas Ruff retrospective. The Tate’s magazine features an article about his work which includes a collection of various images. There also is what they call a Thomas Ruff Montage Maker - which I didn’t look at myself (for technical reasons - it’s designed for Microsoft’s “Internet Explorer” which I refuse to use).Read more »

I tried to find photos by the Bechers but I wasn’t too successful. Here are some of their water towers, above you can see some of the frame-work houses. The Goethe Institute has a nice bio and some notes on their work: “Founders of a new German school of Sachlichkeit , or objectivity, the uncompromising way they have catalogued the twilight of the industrial era has been seen by many as a homage to, or a glorification of, western industriality. Perhaps. Looking a little further, one can begin to see inconsistencies and slippage in a parody of a catalogue of the real.” (at the very bottom of that page, there are three links to photos)
PS: It’s quite interesting that the word “objectivity” isn’t a completely exact translation of the German word “Sachlichkeit”. Maybe I’m too anal about it (you might think) but in being that I am actually following that kind of concept to a certain extent. Of course, I can’t come up with a better translation. Maybe you can understand it like this: When you meet a German you’ll note that they are almost a tad too deadpan about things. I’ve noticed that non-Germans think Germans simply have no sense of humour but that’s just a simplifying misconception. I remember I once made a somewhat absurd joke in front of my advisor in grad school - a Brit - and he thought I was being serious. He just couldn’t imagine a German would say something like that, with a deadpan expression, and joke at the same time.
There’s a lot of Sachlichkeit in many Germans. You state things the way they are and that’s it. Of course, it’s somewhat absurd if a German tries to explain something like that - how could you ever make sense talking about yourself? - but maybe you got an idea of what this is all about.Read more »

Following up on an earlier entry about Thomas Ruff, here is an interesting article from artnet.com about Thomas Ruff with more details about his work and background in general. I think the author’s reference to German painter Gerhard Richter is very important.
Thomas Ruff is teaching at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, and you can look at his students’ portfolios here. And there are more examples from Ruff’s “Nudes” series” here and here (note: the latter link sometimes is a bit flaky).Read more »